At 4pm on Thursday 14 December Egyptian journalist AbdulRahman Ezz was prevented from boarding his flight to France from Edinburgh Airport where he intended to cover the yellow vest demonstrations in Paris. Waiting for him at the door of the plane was a policeman wearing civilian uniform who asked for a brief word before he continued to board. “Have I done something wrong?” he asked. Ezz had been through a similar ordeal last year when he was detained on a flight from Istanbul for six hours. His camera, phone and computer were confiscated and not returned to him for a week. “It’s no problem,” replied the policeman, leading him aside and gesturing towards another woman. “Myself and my colleague just have some questions, come to this room.” He went on to inform Ezz that the interview would be held under the Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act Law 2000, which has been described by advocacy group Liberty as a broad and intrusive power to stop individuals at airports without even suspecting the person has been involved in terrorism. [ read more ]

In the early hours of 18 January 2017 Keren Manor was filming a raid on the unrecognised Bedouin village of Umm Al-Hiran in the Naqab desert, just metres away from where one of its residents, Yaqoub Abu Al-Qi’an, was bleeding to death. How he came to be here would soon become the centre of a debate between Israeli policemen and members of the community. As part of the Activestills collective, which documents resistance against Israel’s colonial project, that morning Manor was answering a call for human rights workers to stand in solidarity with residents – plans had been made public to demolish the village so that an Israeli settlement could be built on its ruins. [ read more ]

On Wednesday afternoon the nursery where Rana Greash’s daughter was enrolled called her and invited her for a meeting. “My partner knows who Laila’s father is,” said the manager when Rana arrived. “He knows where her father is and has refused to allow Laila to continue at the nursery.” The manager tried to convince her partner to change his mind but he refused, so Rana gathered her daughter’s belongings and took her home. The family live in Ismailia, a city in the north-east of Egypt on the west bank of the Suez Canal, but it was in 6 October City, just outside Cairo, where Laila’s father was kidnapped on 29 February 2016. He was forcibly disappeared for a month and then brought before the State Security Prosecution on charges of assassinating Hisham Barakat, Egypt’s public prosecutor who was killed in a car bomb in 2015. Ahmad Wahdan was taken to the Scorpion, a wing within Tora Prison, which is notorious for its brutal treatment of inmates and lack of independent oversight. One year later he was sentenced to death. [ read more ]

In 2014, fresh from the coup they led against the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the government offered Yehya Okail the position of deputy mayor of North Sinai. He wasn’t the most obvious choice. The 2011 revolution had elevated Okail to Member of Parliament for the Brotherhood’s political wing, the Freedom and Justice Party, within the Sinai Province where he was leading demonstrations against the new military-backed government. Okail’s path to politics wasn’t exactly conventional though he had held a string of high profile positions, including Secretary of the Development Fund in his village and President of the Association for the Development of Bedouin Women. He studied mathematics, received a high diploma in Islamic studies and then in 2010 was arrested and detained for seven months on charges of espionage and colluding with Hamas. [ read more ]

Over the last 30 days the world has come to know Jamal Khashoggi as the journalist who was killed inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. MEMO speaks to his fiancée Hatice Cengiz about the man she knew and loved. [ read more ]

In December 2012 Abdelrahman Zaid became one of the thousands of civilians to be incarcerated in Mubarak’s sweep to end the Arab Spring. At the time of his arrest he was holding documents to say he was a Palestinian refugee due to his father’s origin and the media used this to depict him as a foreigner who had come to Egypt to make trouble. He was sentenced to five years in prison and left Egypt in six days. As he searched for somewhere to go Abdelrahman found that unlike the US and Europe South Korea offered Egyptians visa-free travel. He had the impression that South Korea was “a nice country with a good economy” and on top of this, in 1994 it had become a signatory of the UN refugee convention. He landed in Seoul on 4 April 2016. [ read more ]